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Reviews
THE POETS’ CORNER – VI
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888.)
David Westren, by Mr. Alfred Hayes, is a long narrative poem in Tennysonian blank verse, a sort of serious novel set to music. It is somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but robbing it of truth. Still, it is not without power, and cultured verse is certainly a pleasanter medium for story-telling than coarse and common prose. The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular Christian school:
A lover of good cheer; a bubbling source
Of jest and tale; a monarch of the gun;
A dreader tyrant of the darting trout
Than that bright bird whose azure lightning threads
The brooklet’s bowery windings; the red fox
Did well to seek the boulder-strewn hill-side,
When Westren cheered her dappled foes; the otter
Had cause to rue the dawn when Westren’s form
Loomed through the streaming bracken, to waylay
Her late return from plunder, the rough pack
Barking a jealous welcome round their friend.
One day he meets on the river a lovely girl who is angling, and helps her to land
A gallant fish, all flashing in the sun
In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems,
His back thick-sprinkled as a leopard’s hide
With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.
They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years David Westren leads a perfectly happy life. Suddenly calamity comes upon him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate. Then begins his struggle. Like Job, he cries out against the injustice of things, and his own personal sorrow makes him realise the sorrow and misery of the world. But the answer that satisfied Job does not satisfy him. He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan:
As if we lacked reminding of brute force,
As if we never felt the clumsy hoof,
As if the bulk of twenty million whales
Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws
That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense
Of outrage in a loving human heart!
Sublime? majestic? Ay, but when our trust
Totters, and faith is shattered to the base,
Grand words will not uprear it.
Mr. Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of view. David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave him preaching platitudes to a village congregation. However, in spite of this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in Mr. Hayes’s poem that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression. Some of his descriptive touches of nature, such as
In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist
Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,
are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in literature.
There is much that is fascinating in Mr. Rennell Rodd’s last volume, The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems. Mr. Rodd looks at life with all the charming optimism of a young man, though he is quite conscious of the fact that a stray note of melancholy, here and there, has an artistic as well as a popular value; he has a keen sense of the pleasurableness of colour, and his verse is distinguished by a certain refinement and purity of outline; though not passionate he can play very prettily with the words of passion, and his emotions are quite healthy and quite harmless. In Excelsis, the most ambitious poem in the book, is somewhat too abstract and metaphysical, and such lines as
Lift thee o’er thy ‘here’ and ‘now,’
Look beyond thine ‘I’ and ‘thou,’
are excessively tedious. But when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed. A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice. These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel. The prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring:
Such blue of sky, so palely fair,
Such glow of earth, such lucid air!
Such purple on the mountain lines,
Such deep new verdure in the pines!
The live light strikes the broken towers,
The crocus bulbs burst into flowers,
The sap strikes up the black vine stock,
And the lizard wakes in the splintered rock,
And the wheat’s young green peeps through the sod,
And the heart is touched with a thought of God;
The very silence seems to sing,
It must be Spring, it must be Spring!
We do not care for ‘palely fair’ in the first line, and the repetition of the word ‘strikes’ is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and delicacy of touch are pleasing.
The Wind, by Mr. James Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr. Here is the opening:
The roaming, tentless wind
No rest can ever find —
From east, and west, and south, and north
He is for ever driven forth!
From the chill east
Where fierce hyænas seek their awful feast:
From the warm west,
By beams of glitt’ring summer blest.
Nothing could be much worse than this, and if the line ‘Where fierce hyænas seek their awful feast’ is intended to frighten us, it entirely misses its effect. The ode is followed by some sonnets which are destined, we fear, to be ludibria ventis. Immortality, even in the nineteenth century, is not granted to those who rhyme ‘awe’ and ‘war’ together.
Mr. Isaac Sharp’s Saul of Tarsus is an interesting, and, in some respects, a fine poem.
Saul of Tarsus, silently,
With a silent company,
To Damascus’ gates drew nigh.
* * * * *
And his eyes, too, and his mien
Were, as are the eagles, keen;
All the man was aquiline —
are two strong, simple verses, and indeed the spirit of the whole poem is dignified and stately. The rest of the volume, however, is disappointing. Ordinary theology has long since converted its gold into lead, and words and phrases that once touched the heart of the world have become wearisome and meaningless through repetition. If Theology desires to move us, she must re-write her formulas.
There is something very pleasant in coming across a poet who can apostrophise Byron as
transcendent star
That gems the firmament of poesy,
and can speak of Longfellow as a ‘mighty Titan.’ Reckless panegyrics of this kind show a kindly nature and a good heart, and Mr. Mackenzie’s Highland Daydreams could not possibly offend any one. It must be admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case with natural spontaneous verse. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern. Nature is always a little behind the age.
The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry. Mr. Nash, who styles himself ‘a humble soldier in the army of Faith,’ expresses a hope that his book may ‘invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,’ but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such a paraphrase as the following:
Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest,
The birds of air find shelter in the nest;
But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all,
Has no abiding place His own to call.
It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best intentions, and that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves very seriously.
(1) David Westren. By Alfred Hayes, M.A. New Coll., Oxon. (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers.)
(2) The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems. By Rennell Rodd. (David Stott.)
(3) The Wind and Six Sonnets. By James Ross. (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith.)
(4) Saul of Tarsus. By Isaac Sharp. (Kegan Paul.)
(5) Highland Daydreams. By George Mackenzie. (Inverness: Office of the Northern Chronicle.)
(6) The Story of the Cross. By Charles Nash. (Elliot Stock.)
M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)
The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike writer – this is the best description we can give of M. Caro’s Life of George Sand. The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in literature that he could not explain away for their edification; having never done anything remarkable he was naturally elected a member of the Academy, and he always remained loyal to the traditions of that thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious institution. In fact, he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand’s genius. He was too feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and ardent mind. He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never brings us near to her wonderful personality. He looks on her simply as a littérateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of charming, if somewhat exaggerated, romances. But George Sand was much more than this. Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and Mauprat, François le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of them is she adequately expressed, by none of them is she adequately revealed. As Mr. Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, ‘We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.’ With this spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy. Madame Sand’s doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd. The best thing for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secrétaire Intime. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with such airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to class George Sand’s novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in using fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of influencing the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying out the traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of Chateaubriand. The novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry or to science. That it has found in philosophy one of its strongest allies seems not to have occurred to him. In an English critic such a view might possibly be excusable. Our greatest novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray cared little for the philosophy of their age. But coming, as it does, from a French critic, the statement seems to show a strange want of recognition of one of the most important elements of French fiction. Nor, even in the narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro be said to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic. To take merely one instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand’s delightful treatment of art and the artist’s life. And yet how exquisitely does she analyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to life! In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le Château des Désertes of acting; in Les Maîtres Mosaïstes of mosaic work; in Le Château de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La Daniella of the painting of landscape. What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for England she did for France. She invented an art literature. It is unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M. Caro’s minor failings, for the whole effect of the book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the scope and character of George Sand’s genius, is entirely spoiled by the false attitude assumed from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem to many harsh and exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute incapacity for appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no qualification for writing a treatise on the subject.
As for Madame Sand’s private life, which is so intimately connected with her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it. He passes it over with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose passions M. Paul Bourget analyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was a typical French grisette, into ‘a very amiable and spirituelle milliner’! It must be admitted that Joseph Surface himself could hardly show greater tact and delicacy, though we ourselves must plead guilty to preferring Madame Sand’s own description of her as an ‘enfant du vieux pavé de Paris.’
As regards the English version, which is by M. Gustave Masson, it may be up to the intellectual requirements of the Harrow schoolboys, but it will hardly satisfy those who consider that accuracy, lucidity and ease are essential to a good translation. Its carelessness is absolutely astounding, and it is difficult to understand how a publisher like Mr. Routledge could have allowed such a piece of work to issue from his press. ‘Il descend avec le sourire d’un Machiavel’ appears as ‘he descends into the smile of a Machiavelli’; George Sand’s remark to Flaubert about literary style, ‘tu la considères comme un but, elle n’est qu’un effet’ is translated ‘you consider it an end, it is merely an effort’; and such a simple phrase as ‘ainsi le veut Festhe’tique du roman’ is converted into ‘so the æsthetes of the world would have it.’ ‘Il faudra relâcher mes Économies’ is ‘I will have to draw upon my savings,’ not ‘my economies will assuredly be relaxed’; ‘cassures résineuses’ is not ‘cleavages full of rosin,’ and ‘Mme. Sand ne réussit que deux fois’ is hardly ‘Madame Sand was not twice successful.’ ‘Querelles d’école’ does not mean ‘school disputations’; ‘ceux qui se font une sorte d’esthétique de l’indifférence absolue’ is not ‘those of which the æsthetics seem to be an absolute indifference’; ‘chimère’ should not be translated ‘chimera,’ nor ‘lettres inéditées’ ‘inedited letters’; ‘ridicules’ means absurdities, not ‘ridicules,’ and ‘qui pourra définir sa pensée?’ is not ‘who can clearly despise her thought?’ M. Masson comes to grief over even such a simple sentence as ‘elle s’étonna des fureurs qui accueillirent ce livre, ne comprenant pas que l’on haïsse un auteur à travers son œuvre,’ which he translates ‘she was surprised at the storm which greeted this book, not understanding that the author is hated through his work.’ Then, passing over such phrases as ‘substituted by religion’ instead of ‘replaced by religion,’ and ‘vulgarisation’ where ‘popularisation’ is meant, we come to that most irritating form of translation, the literal word-for-word style. The stream ‘excites itself by the declivity which it obeys’ is one of M. Masson’s finest achievements in this genre, and it is an admirable instance of the influence of schoolboys on their masters. However, it would be tedious to make a complete ‘catalogue of slips,’ so we will content ourselves by saying that M. Masson’s translation is not merely quite unworthy of himself, but is also quite undeserved by the public. Nowadays, the public has its feelings.
George Sand. By the late Elmé Marie Caro. Translated by Gustave Masson, B.A., Assistant Master, Harrow School. ‘Great French Writers’ Series. (Routledge and Sons.)
THE POETS’ CORNER – VII
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1888.)
Mr. Ian Hamilton’s Ballad of Hádji is undeniably clever. Hádji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem – for there is a moral – seems to be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies. In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any assistance. Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning
Yes – like a bubble filled with smoke —
The curd-white moon upswimming broke
The vacancy of space;
but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar —
I hung as close as keepsake locket
On maiden breast – but from its socket
He wrenched my bridle arm, are dreadful, and ‘his brains festooned the thorn’ is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died. All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad. To say that the sun kisses the earth ‘with flame-moustachoed lip’ is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines. Mr. Ian Hamilton should prune. Pruning, whether in the garden or in the study, is a most healthy and useful employment. The volume is nicely printed, but Mr. Strang’s frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.
Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats – a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary wine – and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that his poems are ‘addressed to the rising generation,’ whom, he tells us elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth that ‘Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.’ In order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does not convey that secret to the reader. It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs. In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things. The sonnet on Shelley’s room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.
Green in the wizard arms
Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
An isle of old enchantment,
A melancholy isle,
Enchanted and dreaming lies;
And there, by Shannon’s flowing
In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
The spectre Erin sits.
Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
Banshee of the world – no more!
Thy sorrows are the world’s, thou art no more alone;
Thy wrongs the world’s —
are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter’s poem The Banshee. To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr. Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us. Such a verse as —
Five were the chiefs who challenged
By their deeds the Over-kingship,
Bov Derg, the Daghda’s son, Ilbrac of Assaroe,
And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha;
And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned
Upon the hills of Bri,
Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart;
And last was Angus Og; all these had many voices,
But for Bov Derg were most, has, of course, an archæological interest, but has no artistic value at all. Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo-epics that Mr. Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore. A Bacchic Day is charming, and the sonnet on the open-air performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.
Mr. Peacock is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplée, A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is entitled to be called the Laureate of the West. Though a staunch Republican, Mr. Peacock, according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peacock who, it seems, are natives of Scotland. He was brought up at Zanesville, Muskingum Co., Ohio, where his father edited the Zanesville Aurora, and he had an uncle who was ‘a superior man’ and edited the Wheeling Intelligencer. His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday Review and the Commercial Advertiser. The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying. The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the poem on Chicago:
Chicago! great city of the West!
All that wealth, all that power invest;
Thou sprang like magic from the sand,
As touched by the magician’s wand.
‘Thou sprang’ is slightly depressing, and the second line is rather obscure, but we should not measure by too high a standard the untutored utterances of artless nature. The opening lines of The Vendetta also deserve mention:
When stars are glowing through day’s gloaming glow,
Reflecting from ocean’s deep, mighty flow,
At twilight, when no grim shadows of night,
Like ghouls, have stalked in wake of the light.
The first line is certainly a masterpiece, and, indeed, the whole volume is full of gems of this kind. The Professor remarks in his elaborate preface that Mr. Peacock ‘frequently rises to the sublime,’ and the two passages quoted above show how keenly critical is his taste in these matters and how well the poet deserves his panegyric.
Mr. Alexander Skene Smith’s Holiday Recreations and Other Poems is heralded by a preface for which Principal Cairns is responsible. Principal Cairns claims that the life-story enshrined in Mr. Smith’s poems shows the wide diffusion of native fire and literary culture in all parts of Scotland, ‘happily under higher auspices than those of mere poetic impulse.’ This is hardly a very felicitous way of introducing a poet, nor can we say that Mr. Smith’s poems are distinguished by either fire or culture. He has a placid, pleasant way of writing, and, indeed, his verses cannot do any harm, though he really should not publish such attempts at metrical versions of the Psalms as the following:
A septuagenarian
We frequently may see;
An octogenarian
If one should live to be,
He is a burden to himself
With weariness and woe
And soon he dies, and off he flies,
And leaveth all below.
The ‘literary culture’ that produced these lines is, we fear, not of a very high order.
‘I study Poetry simply as a fine art by which I may exercise my intellect and elevate my taste,’ wrote the late Mr. George Morine many years ago to a friend, and the little posthumous volume that now lies before us contains the record of his quiet literary life. One of the sonnets, that entitled Sunset, appeared in Mr. Waddington’s anthology, about ten years after Mr. Morine’s death, but this is the first time that his collected poems have been published. They are often distinguished by a grave and chastened beauty of style, and their solemn cadences have something of the ‘grand manner’ about them. The editor, Mr. Wilton, to whom Mr. Morine bequeathed his manuscripts, seems to have performed his task with great tact and judgment, and we hope that this little book will meet with the recognition that it deserves.
(1) The Ballad of Hádji and Other Poems. By Ian Hamilton. (Kegan Paul.)
(2) Poems in the Modern Spirit, with The Secret of Content. By Charles Catty. (Walter Scott.)
(3) The Banshee and Other Poems. By John Todhunter. (Kegan Paul.)
(4) Poems of the Plain and Songs of the Solitudes. By Thomas Bower Peacock. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons.)
(5) Holiday Recreations and Other Poems. By Alexander Skene Smith. (Chapman and Hall.)
(6) Poems. By George Morine. (Bell and Son.)
